Trade Center warning baffles police An ‘urban myth’ turns out to be true — but what does it mean? By Jonathan Alter SPECIAL TO MSNBC NEW YORK, Oct. 12 — I went to Brooklyn this week in search of an “urban myth” about the World Trade Center attacks. What I came back with was no longer a myth — it was cold, chilling fact. But it didn’t clear anything up for me; that the “myth” was true only made matters murkier. Was word of the attacks on the street beforehand? I wanted to find out. YOU KNOW the “myths”...

Fifteen minutes after KLM Flight 685 took off from Amsterdam for Mexico City on April 8, Mexican authorities forwarded the names of all the passengers to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The reason: the flight was scheduled to pass through U.S. airspace. by the time the Boeing 747 had finished its three-hour crossing of the Atlantic, Homeland Security screeners were on high alert. The names of two Saudi passengers aboard the KLM flight had begun producing "hits" on the screening center's lists of 70,000 suspect foreigners. The two Saudis, the database reported, were brothers and pilots who had attended...

Russia Helped Al-Qaeda, Arming Iran — Intelligence Reports MosNews New evidence connects Saddam Hussein to support for al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks, and even more disturbing links between the terrorist network and Russian intelligence, reports Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin. According to the report in the premium, online intelligence weekly published by the founder of WorldNetDaily, Moscow is playing a dangerous and duplicitous chess game aimed at shortening the U.S. military occupation of Iraq. In addition to the covert intelligence support provided to al-Qaeda, sources say Russian intelligence personnel met in early January with their Iranian and Indian counterparts to...

Russia Moved Iraqi WMD Charles R. Smith Thursday, March 3, 2005 Moscow Moved Weapons to Syria and Lebanon According to a former top Bush administration official, Russian special forces teams moved weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq to Syria. "I am absolutely sure that Russian Spetsnatz units moved WMD out of Iraq before the war," stated John Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary for international technology security. Story Continues Below According to Shaw, Russian units hid Saddam's arsenal inside Syria and in Lebanon's Bekka valley. "While in Iraq I uncovered detailed information that Spetsnatz units shredded records and moved all...

Russia Moved Iraqi WMD Charles R. Smith Thursday, March 3, 2005 Moscow Moved Weapons to Syria and Lebanon According to a former top Bush administration official, Russian special forces teams moved weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq to Syria. "I am absolutely sure that Russian Spetsnatz units moved WMD out of Iraq before the war," stated John Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary for international technology security. Story Continues Below According to Shaw, Russian units hid Saddam's arsenal inside Syria and in Lebanon's Bekka valley. "While in Iraq I uncovered detailed information that Spetsnatz units shredded records and moved all...

Federal officials were repeatedly warned in the months before the 11 September 2001 terror attacks that Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida were planning aircraft hijackings and suicide attacks, according to a new report that the Bush administration has been suppressing. Critics say the new information undermines the government's claim that intelligence about al-Qa'ida's ambitions was "historical" in nature. The independent commission investigating the attacks on New York and Washington concluded that while officials at the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) did receive warnings, they were "lulled into a false sense of security". As a result, "intelligence that indicated a real and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A newly released memo warned the White House at the start of the Bush administration that al Qaeda represented a threat throughout the Islamic world, a warning that critics said went unheeded by President Bush (news - web sites) until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The memo dated Jan. 25, 2001 -- five days after Bush took office -- was an essential feature of last year's hearings into intelligence failures before the attacks on New York and Washington. A copy of the document was posted on the National Security Archive Web site on Thursday. The memo, from...

NEW YORK - Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites) officials received 52 warnings prior to Sept. 11, 2001, from their own security experts about potential al-Qaida attacks, including some that mentioned airline hijackings or suicide attacks, The New York Times reported. The Times said in Thursday editions that a previously undisclosed report by the 9/11 commission that investigated the suicide airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (news - web sites) detailed warnings given to FAA (news - web sites) leaders from April to Sept. 10, 2001, about the radical Islamic terrorist group and its leader,...

The Man Who Knew is the story of the life and death of FBI Special Agent John O'Neill. As the bureau's top counter-terrorism agent, O'Neill had investigated the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa and the USS Cole in Yemen. For six years, O'Neill was the FBI's leading expert on Al Qaeda. He warned of its reach. He warned of its threat to the U.S. He came to believe that the United States should kill Osama bin Laden before Al Qaeda launched a devastating attack on America. But O'Neill's often lonely voice was muted by a headquarters bureaucracy that...

AP: U.S. Foresaw Terror Threats in 1970s 1 hour, 7 minutes ago U.S. Government - AP By FRANK BASS and RANDY HERSCHAFT, Associated Press Writers WASHINGTON - Nearly three decades before the Sept. 11 attacks, a high-level government panel developed plans to protect the nation against terrorist acts ranging from radiological "dirty bombs" to airline missile attacks, according to declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press. AP Photo "Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand at the edge of an awful abyss," Robert Kupperman, chief scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, wrote in a 1977...

VATICAN CITY - The Italian cardinal sent by Pope John Paul (news - web sites) II last year to try to dissuade President Bush (news - web sites) from invading Iraq (news - web sites) said Monday the president promised that the U.S. operation would be "quick." Cardinal Pio Laghi visited Bush at the White House on March 5, 2003, to relay the pope's position that dialogue, not arms, should be used to resolve the crisis over Iraq, which the United States accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction. "When I went to Washington as the pope's envoy just before...

SIR Richard Branson tried to prevent the Iraq war in a secret deal with Nelson Mandela. The Virgin boss hoped to send the former leader of South Africa to meet Saddam Hussein and persuade him to go into exile. He even got United Nations chief Kofi Annan's approval for the plan, despite fears that Saddam might kidnap Mandela. A private jet was ready to fly the Nobel Peace Prize winner to Iraq. Branson offered to join him on the peace mission. But coalition forces invaded Iraq just before they went. Branson opposed invasion plans and believed if they could offer...

Report Warned Of Suicide Hijackings WASHINGTON, May 17, 2002 Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, an analysis prepared for U.S. intelligence warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon. "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said. The Bush administration has asserted that no one in government had envisioned a suicide hijacking before it happened. "Had I...

American and European intelligence agencies believe that between January and March, 2003, Russian intelligence and commando units went to Iraq to destroy, as much as possible, evidence of Russian aid to Saddam Hussein during the period of the UN embargo. For over three decades, Russia has been a major supplier of weapons, and weapons technology, to Iraq. -snip-

Russian special forces troops allegedly transferred Saddam Hussein’s weapons and equipment — some of which had been made in Russia — out of Iraq and into Syria weeks before the U.S.-led military operation began in the country in March 2003. In an interview with The Washington Times, John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, “almost certainly” removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad. “The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units,” the newspaper...

Many felt that the events of September 11 came out of the blue. Security expert Professor Lawrence Freedman, however, considers there was a slow but certain build-up to the day. Here he examines the shape of US involvement in international affairs from the early 1980s. Before September 11 The events of September 11 are the latest, and most far-reaching, of a long series of painful encounters between the United States and the forces of terrorism. In the build-up to those events, and in the history of America's subjection to terrorism, the date of 23 October 1983 is also a highly...

While the nation was having a good laugh at the expense of Florida’s hanging chads and butterfly ballots, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi were there, in Florida, learning to drive commercial jetliners [and ram them into the World Trade Center towers]. It will take a novelist to paint that broad canvas properly. It will take some deep political thinking to understand how the lackadaisical attitude toward government and the world helped leave the country so unready for the horror that Atta and Shehhi were preparing. —Michael Oreskes, New York Times, October 21, 2001. THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS on the...

The U.S. military continues to back its estimate that the former Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq transferred much of its weapons of mass destruction arsenal to neighboring Syria. U.S. officials said that U.S. Army Intelligence does not share the conclusion that Saddam had abandoned his WMD program before the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003. They said military intelligence has attributed the U.S. failure to find Iraqi WMD platforms or munitions to Saddam's transfer of these systems to Syria in late 2002 and early 2003.

The big three arms suppliers were Russia (and the Soviet Union), China and France: Russia supplied 122 different types of arms and a total of nearly 13 million items; China had provided 19 different types of arms and almost 380,000 items; France had supplied 12 different armaments and more than 115,000 items.

Islamic Calendar for Sept. 2001Jet hitting lower Manhattan A calendar which was printed in Egypt and for the month of September shows a crashing passenger plane with Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop -- and which was printed in May, a full three months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America -- has caused an uproar in the Dutch town of Almere, Netherlands, the newspaper De Telegraaf reported yesterday. The calendar was distributed at an Islamic school long before the World Trade Center attacks. Mayor Hans Ouwerkerk, who was alerted to the calendar's existence in ...

The real culprit of 9/11? Author: Date: July 23, 2004 On the eve of the publication of its report, the 9/11 Commission was given a stunning document from Pakistan, claiming that Pakistani intelligence officers knew in advance of the 9/ 11 attacks. The document, from a high-level, but anonymous Pakistani source, also claims that Osama bin Laden has been receiving periodic treatment for dialysis in a military hospital in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province adjacent to the Afghan border. The document was received by the Commission this week as its own report was already coming off the...

On August 31, 1998, before the crisis reached its peak, Hassan al-Turabi approached Iraqi vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan, then visiting Khartoum, and asked if bin Laden could move his headquarters to Iraq. Ramadan immediately responded with a resounding yes, and bin Laden was notified within a few hours. Bin Laden has had some relations with Iraqi intelligence since 1993, when he played a role in the preparation and running of the Islamist operations in Somalia in which Iraqi special forces and Arab “Afghans” retrained by Iraqi intelligence also took part. In June 1994 bin Laden met Faruq al-Hijazi, then...

An Iranian general collaborated with Al Qaida to arrange the transit through Iran of nine of the September 11 hijackers, the Arabic newspaper Asarq al-Aqsat reported Monday.'A general in the Revolutionary Guard apparatus coordinated with the number two man in Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, to provide safe passage to around nine of those who carried out the attacks,' the London based newspaper said.It cited as its source an official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and said Zawahri, who requested the help, has links going back to the general going back to the early 1990's.Iranian governmental spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh challenged the...

CHRISTIAN aid workers facing capital charges in Afghanistan are being tried by a judge who has already demanded an "exemplary" punishment. In a speech at a mosque last month, Taliban Chief Justice Mullah Noor Mohammed Saqib called for a guilty verdict against eight Western captives and 16 Afghans accused of converting Muslims to Christianity in order to "end such un-Islamic practice by any foreign group in Afghanistan". Mullah Saqib insisted yesterday that he was overseeing a fair trial. The foreigners were innocent until proven guilty and would be tried according to the Sharia Islamic law. He said: "The punishment will...

Authorities Conclude Switzerland Likely Used as Base for Financing, Logistical Support for 9/11 Attacks by Al-Qaida By Daniela Sigrist Associated Press Writer Published: Jun 24, 2004 BERN, Switzerland (AP) - Investigators have concluded that Switzerland was likely used as a base for financing and logistical support for the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaida, the country's attorney general said Thursday. Federal Prosecutor Valentin Roschacher said authorities plan to begin court proceedings in the coming weeks in three terror cases, capping investigations started four days after the 2001 suicide hijackings in New York and Washington. A special task force initially was charged...

President Clinton offered his most detailed public explanation to date yesterday for why curtailing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs is worth going to war, while the administration blessed an effort by the U.N. leader to travel to Baghdad to seek a diplomatic solution to the crisis. In a noontime address to the military at the Pentagon broadcast live by television networks, Clinton said Iraq's history of "delay and deception" over weapons inspections since its surrender in the 1991 Persian Gulf War has created an impasse in which a U.S. military strike may be "the only answer." At the Pentagon,...

WASHINGTON, June 16 - In early 1999, Osama bin Laden summoned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to his well-guarded compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to confide to the lieutenant that his long-discussed proposal to use aircraft as terror weapons against the United States had the full support of Al Qaeda. That meeting, described for the first time by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, set in motion an extraordinary series of events. But the path from Kandahar to the World Trade Center was anything but a straight line. Described in vivid detail by two captured Qaeda operatives who helped plan...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda had originally planned to crash hijacked planes into 10 targets in the United States and carry out simultaneous attacks in southeast Asia, the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks said on Wednesday. The commission issued a report saying that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the main planner of the Sept. 11 attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people, had originally drawn up a more-extensive scheme in which he would also pilot a hijacked airplane. Al Qaeda had drawn up a list of targets that originally included the sites hit on Sept. 11 -- the...

Well, a library in Illinois was selling off some of its magazines on ebay, and I was able to get all of the US News and TIME magazines from 1997/8/9/00. I've also been reading a few interesting books published before 2000. So, in the interest of playing the who-lied game, I compiled this list of Iraq's ties to Al Queda using only sources that are NOT from the Bush admininstration. Most come from before the current President was even a candidate. No Bush lies in this list. If you find lies....their Clinton lies. (and if such "lies" are found, I'm...

Former CIA Director James Woolsey said Thursday that it would be wrong for an upcoming report by the Senate Intelligence Committee to blame the CIA for the 9/11 attacks in the wake of Director George Tenet's resignation. "I think if the Senate committee comes out with a report that says Tenet or the CIA was principally responsible for 9/11, it will just be wrong," Tenet told CNN's "Paula Zahn Now." Woolsey contended that while the CIA can be faulted for not telling the FBI that two of the 9/11 hijackers had entered the country after attending an al Qaida...

LONDON - More than a year before 9/11, a Pakistani-British man told the FBI an incredible tale: that he had been trained by bin Laden’s followers to hijack airplanes and was now in America to carry out an attack. The FBI questioned him for weeks, but then let him go home, and never followed up. Now, the former al-Qaida insider is talking.

How Chinagate Led to 9/11 By Jean Pearce FrontPageMagazine.com | May 25, 2004 As the 9/11 Commission tries to uncover what kept intelligence agencies from preventing September 11, it has overlooked two vital factors: Jamie Gorelick and Bill Clinton. Gorelick, who has browbeaten the current administration, helped erect the walls between the FBI, CIA and local investigators that made 9/11 inevitable. However, she was merely expanding the policy Bill Clinton established with Presidential Decision Directive 24. What has been little underreported is why the policy came about: to thwart investigations into the Chinese funding of Clinton’s re-election campaign, and the...

IT makes a chilling picture. The mastermind behind the September 11 attacks has told interrogators that he and his terrorist nephew leafed through almanacs of US skyscrapers when planning the operation. Sears Tower in Chicago and Library Tower in Los Angeles – which was "blown up" in the film Independence Day – were both potential targets, according to transcripts of interrogations of al-Qa'ida operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. "We were looking for symbols of economic might," he told his captors. He recounted sitting looking at the books with Ramzi Yusuf, his nephew by marriage, who was the man behind the...

ONDON — Did the Bush administration, before the 9/11 attacks, fail to take terrorism seriously enough? At first the contention seems unlikely. Isn't this the most hawkish administration in living memory? Wasn't it President Bush who coined the phrase "war on terror"? Yet in the current hearings on the attacks — and in the controversy surrounding the new book by Richard A. Clarke, the administration's first counterterrorism chief — the words "neglect" and "failure" keep cropping up. And there is something to these accusations — although perhaps not in the sense that the people making them intend. The...

How the Left Undermined America's Security Before 9/11By David HorowitzFrontPageMagazine.com | March 24, 2004 While the nation was having a good laugh at the expense of Florida’s hanging chads and butterfly ballots, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi were there, in Florida, learning to drive commercial jetliners [and ram them into the World Trade Center towers]. It will take a novelist to paint that broad canvas properly. It will take some deep political thinking to understand how the lackadaisical attitude toward government and the world helped leave the country so unready for the horror that Atta and Shehhi were preparing.—Michael...

While the nation was having a good laugh at the expense of Florida’s hanging chads and butterfly ballots, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi were there, in Florida, learning to drive commercial jetliners [and ram them into the World Trade Center towers]. It will take a novelist to paint that broad canvas properly. It will take some deep political thinking to understand how the lackadaisical attitude toward government and the world helped leave the country so unready for the horror that Atta and Shehhi were preparing.—Michael Oreskes, New York Times, October 21, 2001.THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS on the Pentagon and...

WASHINGTON (AP) - One day before the Sept. 11 attacks, senior Bush administration officials agreed that the United States would try to overthrow Afghanistan's Taliban rulers if a final diplomatic push to expel Osama bin Laden from the country failed, a federal panel reported Tuesday. The independent commission reviewing the attacks said in a preliminary report that in the years before the attacks the Clinton and Bush administrations chose to use diplomatic rather than military options, which allowed bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders to elude capture. The commission said that three years before the attacks, Saudi Arabia won a...

At 1:30 on a Wednesday afternoon, two weeks after receiving the nod as Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice walked into a room... Rice told him (Clarke) first, he said, that the dangers appeared to be greater than she had known. "Her second reaction was 'What are you going to do about it?'‚" Clarke said. ....... (Clinton info provided to Condi Rice:) One of those came in a handwritten note, covering less than a page. The lined paper had nothing on it but three names and three telephone numbers – the Pentagon's top career specialists on terrorism. ......... Rice, by...

Official: Kerry failed to act on pre-9/11 tip 3rd agent to say he warned security lapses made Boston airport ripe for 'jihad' attack WASHINGTON - A third federal aviation-security agent, one still with the government, has stepped forward to say he also warned Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry about security lapses at Boston's Logan International Airport before the 9/11 hijackings there. Earlier this week, two former FAA agents said the Democratic presidential hopeful failed to take effective action after they gave him a prophetic warning that his home airport was vulnerable to multiple hijackings. Brian Sullivan, a retired special agent from...

The al Qaeda terrorist network posed a threat to the United States for almost a decade before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Throughout that period -- during the eight years of the Clinton administration and the first eight months of the Bush administration prior to Sept. 11 -- the U.S. government worked hard to counter the al Qaeda threat. During the transition, President-elect Bush's national security team was briefed on the Clinton administration's efforts to deal with al Qaeda. The seriousness of the threat was well understood by the president and his national security principals. In response to my...

Deluded Saddam’s sleepwalk to disaster Dictator convinced himself Bush was bluffing, even as allied forces prepared to attack. DAVID BLAIR ‘In the streets of Baghdad, the absence of any preparation was eerie and perplexing’ Send to a friend Your email: Send to: WHATEVER thoughts may have preyed on Saddam Hussein’s mind as the mighty allied force massed around Iraq, preparing to defend his country from the Anglo-American invaders was not among them. Scarcely a day passed in February and March last year without the US sending more military hardware to the Gulf, piling division upon division and battle group upon...

Former Clinton White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke is preparing to tell the Independent Commission Investigating the Sept. 11 Attacks this week that the Bush administration failed to act on a Clinton administration plan to attack Osama bin Laden. And in a "60 Minutes" interview set to air Sunday night, Clarke blasts Bush for doing "a terrible job on the war against terrorism." But just a year ago Clarke was singing a different tune, telling reporter Richard Miniter, author of the book "Losing bin Laden," that it was the Clinton administration - not team Bush - that had dropped...

The White House late Sunday denied charges of a former anti-terror adviser that President Bush was not properly focused on the threat of al-Qaida. As CBS "60 Minutes" program was featuring former adviser Richard Clarke's accusations, contained in a new book, that Bush ignored warnings about al-Qaida but after the Sept. 11 attacks was eager to link Iraq and the terrorist organization, the White House offered a number of rebuttals. Bush specifically told National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that he was "tired of swatting flies" and wanted to go on the offense against al-Qaida, the White House said. White House...

11 September, 2001 ... people run from the scene as one of the World Trade Center Towers collapses in New York following a terrorist plane crash on the twin towers. AFPWASHINGTON (AFP) - One of the two alleged al-Qaeda members charged on Tuesday tried but failed to set up a satellite television connection so Osama bin Laden could watch the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, according to the indictment. Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen was described by the Pentagon as a "key al-Qaeda propagandist" and former bodyguard to bin Laden, mastermind of the 2001...

Mission to Capture or Kill al Qaeda Leader Frustrated by Near Misses, Political Disputes First of two articles.The seeds of the CIA's first formal plan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden were contained in another urgent manhunt -- for Mir Aimal Kasi, the Pakistani migrant who murdered two CIA employees while spraying rounds from an assault rifle at cars idling before the entrance to the CIA's Langley headquarters in 1993. For several years after the shooting, Kasi remained a fugitive in the border areas straddling Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. From its Langley offices, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center asked the...

Secret interrogations reveal a complacent dictator before US attack. Saddam's big mistakes. He believed a casualty-averse White House would only order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand Iraqi defence ministry believed that any ground offensive would come across the border with Jordan WASHINGTON - A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations with captured Iraqi leaders and former officers. Saddam believed...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 — A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers. Mr. Hussein believed that a "casualty averse" White House would order a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand, according to the secret report, prepared for the Pentagon's most senior leadership and dated Jan. 26. And the Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation,...

German Trial Hears How Iranian Agent Warned U.S. of Impending al-Qaida Attack By Ben Aris The Guardian Saturday 24 January 2004 The United States was warned of impending September 11 terrorist attacks by an Iranian spy, but ignored him, German secret service agents testified yesterday in the trial of an alleged al-Qaida terrorist. The spy, identified as Hamid Reza Zakeri, tried to warn the CIA after leaving Iran in 2001, but was not believed, two German officers who interviewed him told the Hamburg court. Zakeri worked in the department of the Iranian secret services responsible for "carrying out terrorist attacks globally", one of the officers said. Prosecutors...

HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Iran's secret service had contacts with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ahead of the September 11 attacks on the United States, a German court heard on Thursday. Two members of Germany's Federal Criminal Police told a court in Hamburg a former Iranian spy had informed them of the contacts and had also said he tried to warn Washington about the attacks in mid-2001, but that the CIA had not believed him. The police officers were speaking at the trial of a Moroccan accused of aiding the September 11 attacks. The Iranian, identified only by his...